The Lilly Endowment, one of the world’s largest private foundations with assets of more than $10 billion, recently announced a $10 million grant to the new Center for Rural Engagement at Indiana University Bloomington.

This investment is both encouraging and thought-provoking, raising important questions about the glaring geographic disparities in rural access to such private investments, the effectiveness of academic institutions in stimulating and supporting community-level change, and the track record of large foundations in sustaining rural investments over the needed long haul.

NPQ has long reported on the disparate level of private philanthropic investment in rural compared to metropolitan America, as well as large foundations’ preference, when investing in rural, for “already reasonably well-funded nonprofit organizations—for example, private universities or the private foundations of public universities—and groups with the purported education and capacity to apply for, receive, and manage foundation support.”

Clearly, there are exceptions to these patterns of rural philanthropy. For instance,  The Duke Endowment, with assets of more than $3 billion, invested $10.6 million supporting 20 challenged rural communities to undertake large and small collaborative projects for economic and community revitalization. And The Kellogg Foundation and the California Endowment also launched significant multi-year rural initiatives.

A different model of philanthropic investing in rural communities that is focused on a single or just a handful of counties over the long haul is now being tested by both community foundations and health-conversion foundations.  That’s the kind of philanthropy we need to help rural communities move forward—philanthropy that thinks deeply and comprehensively about rural community change and is in it for the long haul.

Read the full article about rural philanthropy by Debby Warren at Nonprofit Quarterly.